Nationalism and expansion

The centenary year 1888 provided the occasion for review and reassessment, and almost inevitably that activity encouraged the growing nationalist sentiment already in evidence in such publications as the weekly Bulletin (founded 1880). The last 20 years of the 19th century saw a marked growth of nationalism and the movement toward federation of the separate states. The Bulletin, with its rallying cry of “Australia for the Australians,” was ardently nationalistic. It urged its contributors to “write Australian” and to celebrate above all the virtues of the Australian worker, especially the bush worker. It endorsed the egalitarian myth of mateship rather than the independence of the little man, the battler, who struggles on his own against the odds. It espoused a cheerful, somewhat larrikin (Australian word meaning, among other things, “rowdy,” or “irresponsible”) brashness, and in this it revealed its underlying urban orientation. Other papers and magazines of the period actively published Australian writing, but the Bulletin attracted the utopian idealists and the sentimental realists who dominated Australian writing at the end of the century. It advocated a spare, laconic style; it preferred a humorous attitude to life’s hardships; and it favoured themes of national pride, the values of rural life, and sympathy for the struggles of small-scale farmers. Among its many contributors, A.B. (“Banjo”) Paterson was acclaimed for composing “Waltzing Matilda” and for his bush ballads, and Henry Lawson published his greatest short stories there. (Among the collections of Lawson’s work are While the Billy Boils [1896] and Children of the Bush [1902]).

Curiously, at the very time the image of young Australia was being so vigorously advanced, Paterson and Lawson and Steele Rudd (pseudonym of Arthur Hoey Davis) showed a pronounced tendency to nostalgia, to the distant in time or place. Joseph Furphy, resisting the call for succinctness, wrote a large complex novel, Such Is Life (1903), describing the rural world of the 1880s. It overflows with details of station life, the conversations of bullock drivers, nationalistic sentiments, and philosophical meditations about chance and determinism.

The reading of the Australian experience in terms of bush realism was open to challenge. Barbara Baynton’s stories in Bush Studies (1902) subvert the persistent “matey” ethos, suggesting instead the darkly disturbing side of bush experience. Christopher Brennan, in such volumes as Poems 1913 (1913), virtually ignored local preoccupations in his Symbolist poetry; he tapped instead the deep sources of spiritual restlessness, particularly through the use of myth and archetype. Some popular writers, such as C.J. Dennis in his verses about the Sentimental Bloke, relocated many of the bush attitudes to the inner city.

By the early decades of the 20th century, the era of bushranging, convictism, and exploration was far enough in the past to be regarded as historical colour. It also was fully expected that the Aboriginal peoples would also pass away—Daisy Bates, who lived for many years among Aboriginal people, used as the title of her book about her experiences the standard phrase The Passing of the Aborigine (1938). Aboriginal people had become the subject of anthropological interest in the work of Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen in Central Australia, and Aboriginal legends had been collected and rewritten by K. Langloh Parker, although there was still very little interest in Aboriginal people as people. Such interest as existed was—in the manner of the times—proprietary, as in Mrs. Aeneas Gunn’s The Little Black Princess (1905) for young readers and in her autobiographical We of the Never-Never (1908), about her experiences on a station in the Northern Territory, the last region of Australia to attract European expansion. It still regards itself as the quintessential Outback.

The first great phase of writing for children also occurred in the Federation era (Australia’s version of the Edwardian period, extending from 1901, when the Australian provinces formed a federation, to just beyond the end of World War I), a time of widespread wealth and security and, for the middle class, of social consolidation. The books for children reflect this atmosphere; they also reflect another reality, the easy acceptance of both Australian and British Empire loyalties. Classic works were written by Ethel Turner, Ethel Pedley, Amy and Louise Mack, May Gibbs, and Mary Grant Bruce (a little later), and Norman Lindsay’s wonderful The Magic Pudding (1918) became standard fare for generations of Australian children.

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Poetry: First Lines

The character of the times is perhaps best represented in the work of such diverse writers as Mary Gilmore, Walter Murdoch, and Miles Franklin. The life span of each of them stretched from colonial times into the modern era; in both their lives and their writing, they represented continuity. Each expressed a kind of independence from time: Gilmore by the long reach of her memory, apparent in such volumes as Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (1934); Murdoch by the gentle whimsy and conversational ease of his essays, as in Speaking Personally (1930); and Franklin by her absorption in the realm of Australian pastoral in such novels as Up the Country (1928), though she is mostly remembered by her early pseudoautobiographical My Brilliant Career (1901). John Shaw Neilson, in the sheer shimmering beauty of his lyric poetry, achieves another order of timelessness, that of the moment of true perception, at once unworldly and firmly located in the natural world.

E.J. Banfield stepped aside from the world for reasons of health and wrote from his island on the Great Barrier Reef a series of books beginning with Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908) that reflected, often wryly, on natural history and the advantages of the contemplative life. Jack McLaren in My Crowded Solitude (1926) was another who encountered timelessness for a time. And C.E.W. Bean found the same slow rhythms of experience out on the great Western plains (On the Wool Track [1910]) and down the Darling River (The Dreadnought of the Darling [1911]). Like Banfield and Murdoch, he identified a genial world and men whose essential character he admired, and, when he entered the world of torrid events as Australia’s official war historian, his thesis was that the courage and resourcefulness of the Australian soldier, the digger, was in fact derived from the bushman—that these were but two manifestations of the national type. The same perception is present in Keith Hancock’s Australia (1930), a reading of Australian history in terms of character.

The most impressive novelist of the period was Henry Handel Richardson (pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson). Her Maurice Guest (1908), set in Leipzig, Germany, is an antiromantic novel about ordinariness caught up with genius, provincialism among the exotic, the tragedy of an insufficiently great passion. Her three-volume masterpiece, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29), traces the fluctuating fortunes of the immigrants who established the new urban Australia in the late 19th century. The last volume, Ultima Thule, graphically describes conditions in the goldfields and brings its character studies of the temperamentally opposite spouses Richard and Mary to a profoundly moving climax. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s realism in Working Bullocks (1926) and in Coonardoo (1929), her sympathetic portrait of an Aboriginal woman, was of a more romantic nature. For others, such as Kylie Tennant and Eleanor Dark, realism served social and historical ends.

Modernism arrived with the poetry of Kenneth Slessor (as evidenced in such of his volumes as Earth-Visitors [1926] and Five Bells [1939]) and R.D. FitzGerald (Forty Years’ Poems [1965] and Product: Later Verses by Robert D. FitzGerald [1977]). Slessor was committed to the importance of the image; FitzGerald was of a more philosophical bent and developed complex arguments in his poems. During the 1930s both became preoccupied with history and the concept of time.

The Depression years directed attention back to the comparable experiences of the early 1890s and confirmed the defining status of that period in Australian cultural mythology, the apotheosis of the acclaimed national virtues—mateship, humorous stoicism, populist pragmatism, and irony. It was also a time of international awakening, and it was a time of discovery, as the many books about travel, especially in the Australian Outback, testify. Among the discoveries of that period was a romantic notion of the spirit of place and the importance, for writers, of what could still be discerned of Aboriginal culture: this discovery gave rise to the Jindyworobak movement, which had as its goal the freeing of Australian art from “alien” influences. By apt coincidence, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938) was published at this time. Herbert’s sprawling comic anarchy, his maverick vision, and the sense of remoteness from regulated society all derive from his Northern Territory milieu. But Capricornia also displays all the themes important to the Jindyworobak movement: concern for the Aboriginal, discovery of the Outback, social protest, and the true spirit of Australia. Before long, however, world events overwhelmed the movement completely.